A Man Who Minds His P’s and Q’s

Aarts and Letters Paul Shaw at the 1881 Farragut Memorial in Madison Square Park. New York City provides a trove of remarkable lettering. Mr. Shaw has already amassed 5,000 photographs for a book proposal.Credit
Tina Fineberg for The New York Times

FISH live in water, birds in air and Paul Shaw in letters. As a historian of graphic design with a passion for architectural lettering, he sees A’s, B’s and C’s in places that the untrained often overlook.

Beholding New York through his eyes can be a revelation, and his special issue of Letters From New York — a booklet published twice a year by a group of professional calligraphers called the Society of Scribes — captures his unique vision. That vision was evident recently during a tour of Mr. Shaw’s immediate neighborhood. The three-block walk to the 96th Street subway station from his building at West End Avenue and 98th Street became a 45-minute series of pauses and detours.

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Tina Fineberg for The New York Times

Right outside his front door is an archaeological timeline of lettering: the glass transoms of a set of eight row houses, 302 through 316 West 98th Street. When placed in 1897, each glass panel must have had its house number consistently rendered — like those at 306 and 308, with the threes like curved daggers, the zeros like sewn-together sets of bloomers, and the other numerals made of segments like trumpets and spearheads. But subsequent transoms in the series reveal regilding, repainting and mass-produced modern lettering.

Mr. Shaw detoured to the 1923 recreation building of Holy Name Church at 214 West 97th Street, a building designed by Raphael Hume. There, he pointed out one of his favorite examples in New York, a simple band reading “Holy Name House” right above the doorway, underneath a charming half-round relief sculpture of boys at play. The style of the lettering is a script called uncial, developed in the first millennium and often seen in religious manuscripts — the letter M looks like a slingshot and the E like a bow and arrow. “See how carefully the designer positioned the M right in the center,” he said. “Whoever it was didn’t just slap something on.”

Another outing, a subterranean trip to Brooklyn, was full of things to see. Mr. Shaw must surely be among a very few who have noticed that, in the Borough Hall station in Brooklyn, the bars of the H’s are not of uniform height, even though the mosaics were prefabricated en masse.

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Tina Fineberg for The New York Times

Each letter or group of letters evoked its own personal response. Passing the Nevins Street station, for example, he said, “Now look at that N — how depressing.” But then he remarked admiringly, “There’s a really nice A in the Atlantic Avenue station.” He found the letter spacing in the Fulton Street station unacceptably tight, but then acknowledged, “You can also find incredibly bad spacing in the Renaissance,” a period known for its calligraphy.

On a stroll from downtown Brooklyn to Clinton Hill and back again, otherwise mundane buildings came alive. Suddenly, on Hoyt Street off Livingston, a pair of two-foot-high Moderne-style neon letters — an A and an R — burst out from the modern vinyl canopies. Deprived of any context, they were a mystery until, several storefronts up, a matching T-H-E was found.

Accounts in The New York Times indicate that, 70 years ago, this building was THE Hoyt-Livingston BAR.

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Tina Fineberg for The New York Times

Near Pratt Institute, a modest apartment house called the Kentshire, at 64 St. James Place, held another lesson. The extended strokes on the K, H and R had “a nice flourish,” Mr. Shaw said, but then he pointed out that the S was weak because it was so attenuated in the center. “The middle of the S should be the strongest piece,” he said. But then he moved on to the R, explaining that its vertical bar, circular shape and diagonal were the places to look for artistic virtuosity.

Despite his strong opinions, Mr. Shaw does not take the traditionalist view that each letter has a Platonic ideal. He is more of a contextualist, believing that “letters are fluid, that they change with time and circumstance — the entire word is more important than a single letter, and its form can fluctuate.”

Born in Ann Arbor, Mich., in 1954, Mr. Shaw worked for a time as a graphic designer to support himself while he studied for a master’s degree at Columbia, where he is now getting a Ph.D. in the history of graphic design. He teaches calligraphy and the history of graphic design at Parsons and the School of Visual Arts.

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Paul Shaw

Last year, Christopher Calderhead, the editor of Letters From New York, asked Mr. Shaw to prepare an article, which was published last fall, taking up the entire second issue. It is available for $12 from Paper & Ink Arts by calling (800) 736-7772 or online at paperinkarts.com/shop.html (click on “Books” and then on “Guild Publications”).

The 80 pages contain photographs of the eerie overlaid L’s of the Hellmuth Building, at 154 West 18th Street; the ingeniously overlaid A and V of the Bowery Savings Bank at 110 East 42nd Street; and the Art Deco letters of McGraw-Hill on the publishing company’s old building at 330 West 42nd Street. Mr. Shaw describes the last as “an Art Deco version of a Fat Face (like the typeface Broadway).”

One of his favorites is the 1881 Farragut Memorial in Madison Square Park, which is carved so that the letters project out of the stone. Another is the 1907 Prasada apartment house, at Central Park West and 65th Street, its letters formed like leaves. When he first noticed them, Mr. Shaw recalled, “I said, ‘Whoa!’ ”

Now Mr. Shaw is working on a book proposal with Mr. Calderhead. So far he has amassed 5,000 photographs of lettering in New York City, but even so, he said, “I’ve only scratched the subject.”